Farrukh Dhondy | Revisiting the ‘Serpent’ saga: My encounters with Sobhraj

“They say there were angels and a crescent moon
When Mother Mary gave birth.
O where are the rains of the last monsoon
-- They’ve sunk into the earth
The Buddha, a Prince, disturbed by life
And so, through a revelation blessed
He abandoned princedom and his wife
To denounce life’s unrest!”
From The Bachchatantra

Charles Sobhraj has been released from a Kathmandu prison and deported to France to spend Christmas, as he said, “with his family”. The present generation will only have heard of him, if at all, through the Netflix and BBC series The Serpent.

The series traced his life and crimes in Bangkok in the early 1970s. Its final episode ended with a caption which effectively said “no one knows why he risked going to Kathmandu in 2003, where he was arrested and convicted to a life sentence for murder”.

Gentle reader, this concluding slogan is wrong. I know why he risked going to Kathmandu, what his ostensible and dual purposes for going there were -- or at least I know what he and his sometime partner told me. It may even be that in my six-year acquaintance with him in London and Paris till the year of his arrest, I was unwittingly instrumental in setting up the circumstances which induced him to take the risk.

Sobhraj first got in touch with me in 1997. He rang my office at Channel Four TV, UK, where I was a commissioning editor. He’d served 20 years in Delhi’s Tihar Jail and was now free. He said his cousin, one Raj Advani, who was with me in college in Pune, had told him that I could help get his memoirs published. I was curious about his memoirs and he said he’d come to London with them. I was, of course, professionally interested in exploring the potential of these memoirs. Confessions of a serial killer?

They weren’t. As I, and the literary agent to whom I introduced Sobhraj, discovered, there were no confessions of murder or even the vaguest allusions to being suspected of them. The memoir consisted of boasts about controlling Tihar Jail and fooling the press.

He wasn’t dismayed when I subsequently told him that it wasn’t publishable. Sobhraj is nothing if he’s not resilient. He suggested I write a film without claiming that it was based on his confessions. After all, there were already two widely read books published about his serial-killing career.

For the next six years, and even after that when he was in prison, he attempted to get me involved in all manner of schemes -- most of them involving some kind of illegal activity, one from Kathmandu prison involving a request for a hot-air-balloon!

Soon after 1997, he was joined in Paris by Chantal, his former wife who abandoned Mr Harris, her husband of over twenty years, and her two daughters and returned to France to join Charles. Charles introduced us and, apart from the dramatic if pathetic story of Chantal’s flight from her American family, she recalled several events she had been part of and some which she said Sobhraj had told her about.

Released from jail last week, Sobhraj told the media that he was ready to sue several parties and even the Nepal government. I have no idea if governments can be sued. Neither do I have any confidence that Sobhraj can, as he protests, prove himself innocent of even one of the murders for which he was convicted in Thailand and Nepal. What I do feel is that the evidence produced for murder in the Nepalese courts wouldn’t stand up in, say, the Old Bailey.

In 2008, when Charles was in jail in Nepal, I wrote a novel and gave it the title The Bikini Murders. It was a contrived plot with fictitious names but the press reviewed it as factually about Sobhraj. I was interviewed on Indian TV by Arnab Goswami who, after some opening banter about the book, switched the cameras to Kathmandu jail from where Sobhraj said he would sue me for writing the book. The publishers had checked with international lawyers whose opinion was that an individual convicted of several murders in two countries had no reputation to libel. He didn’t sue.

Viewing The Serpent and that last slogan induced me, gentle reader, to write the factual account of my association with Charles. The book involves, among much else, my introducing him to the then editor of The Spectator magazine -- one Boris Johnson, to an intimate of the CIA and, at Charles’ offer to intervene positively in the Indian Airlines IC-814 hostage crisis, to a senior Indian civil servant. To this day, Charles claims his intervention led to the release of the hostages.

The episodes I recall, of arms deals, future Prime Ministers, CIA deals and the truth about his escape from Tihar may seem incredible but are true. OK, it’s called Hawk and Hyena and is published in India by Copper Coin (I’ve told you before, not to use this newspaper to advertise your rubbish -- but since this is also current news I’ll let it pass this time -- Ed. Thank you yaar -- and I’m sure Sobhraj will refer to the facts in my book in the near future, so it will be news -- fd)

Sobhraj can threaten, but can he sue? Isn’t his a case of guilty until proved innocent?